Hey there! Welcome to Life, Unfiltered, where I ramble on about the random thoughts that come to mind and also expand on who I am.
Since elementary school, I have been a reader. I ate up all the books from The Magic Treehouse collection, dabbled in fantasy and YA series including The Hunger Games and Red Queen every so often, and eventually settled on historical fiction for a while before expanding my tastes to nonfiction and memoirs.
But of all the books I read throughout my childhood, the series that captivated me the most since I was in third grade were the Seekers and Seekers: Return to the Wild novels by Erin Hunter. Erin Hunter, more commonly known for the Warriors series about four clans of cats, is a pen name used by authors Victoria Holmes, Kate Cary, Cherith Baldry, Tui T. Sutherland, and Inbali Iserles.
The Seekers series follows four bear cubs of different species: polar bear Kallik, black bear Lusa, brown bear Toklo, and shapeshifting brown bear Ujurak, who meet upon each losing their families. The cubs form a powerful bond and they are faced with a daunting journey through which the bears must learn to rely on each other.
Every birthday and every Christmas I begged my parents for the next hardcover of this series. Since I was little, and to this day I’ve always felt a deep connection to Lusa, the little black bear cub who grew up in a zoo. Lusa was constantly underestimated by the other cubs due to her size and lack of familiarity with the wild, but regardless she always prevailed. I never knew I’d find a role model in a fictional black bear cub, but I was inspired because I was Lusa throughout my childhood, and I still am Lusa in adulthood.
I’ve kept these books for nearly a decade now, and last year I decided it was time to part with them and donate the series so other kids could enjoy the fantastic adventure as well. But I began flipping through the pages, seeing how my handwriting slowly transformed from big, blocky letters to neat, elegant cursive as I wrote my name in each book, looking back on the silly annotations I made. I remembered how I clumsily spilled coffee on one of the books when I was reading at breakfast, and how devastated I felt when my water bottle leaked in my backpack at school, completely soaking through two of my Seekers books (which luckily survived!).
The front cover of the first book, Seekers: The Quest Begins, is barely hanging on because I’ve opened and closed it so many times, and carried it everywhere I knew I would have time to read, to gymnastics practice, school, the park, my sister’s ballet studio, the lobby of my mom’s office. I watched myself grow up all over again as I flipped through the pages.
I was always so scared to try and reread the series because I was afraid the story would lose the magic it held when I read it as a child. But I took the leap, and I was almost brought to tears as I restarted my adventure with the cubs, no longer the small, shy third grader I was when I started, but a bold, ambitious adult with goals that younger me would have never dreamed of.
Rereading my favorite childhood series was such a healing experience I’ve denied myself for a long time in the pursuit of becoming more sophisticated and grown up. I suppose I just forgot that I was once, and still am that little girl who held these books so dearly to her heart, that I’m still that little girl who’s favorite animal instantly became black bears upon reading Lusa’s story, and the little girl who carried these books everywhere I went.
Have you ever revisited a childhood book series? Comment below! And as always, thank you for reading.
With nostalgia and reminiscence,
Alexandra
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